A POLICE officer accused of indecently assaulting colleagues has told a court he was having an affair with one of his alleged victims.
Married police constable Gary Cryans, 51, said he had been seeing the officer, that they met up out of work, and everything they did was consensual and that he did take her home from a night out and she initiated a sex act on him.
He denies claims he assaulted two other women and that he kissed a colleague on a night out, insisting that it was she who kissed him.
Cryans is facing eight charges of sexual assault on three colleagues between March 2008 and August 2009. He has lodged a special defence of consent to five of the charges.
He told the jury that on a night out in Glasgow city centre on 1 June, 2009, one of the alleged victims kissed him on the neck. “I was really taken aback,” he said.
Advocate Shelagh McCall, defending, asked: “Did she say anything?”
Cryans replied: “I had said to her ‘What made you do that? I didn’t know you felt like that’ and she said to me ‘I have always felt like that, since we met’.”
He said they spent the rest of the night talking and kissing.
He said another woman on the night out, who alleges he kissed her and touched her leg, had in fact kissed him. Cryans said he drove the two women home and stopped off on the way.
Ms McCall asked: “What happened?”
Cryans replied: “We were kissing again and there was sexual activity.”
Asked if at any time the woman protested or pushed him away, he said: “Not at all.”
The court heard the pair exchanged text messages and met up away from work.
He was also asked about a party where he is alleged to have rubbed himself against one of the women.
Cryans said: “That didn’t happen. During the act we were having, I said ‘I haven’t got a condom’ and she said ‘it doesn’t matter’.”
He told the court they then stopped what they were doing and he went to sleep cuddling in behind her.
Cryans told the court that on another occasion, when it is alleged he assaulted one of the women, they were both sleeping on couches and she was not drunk, and consented. Ms McCall asked the accused if the woman had at any time said she was unhappy while they were having sex.
He replied: “Not at all.”
Ms McCall asked: “Would you describe it as an affair?”
Cryans replied: “I imagine it could be described as that strictly speaking, I suppose you can say it was that.”
He was also asked: “How was your home life at that time?”
The accused – who is married with two grown-up children said: “For me, I wasn’t happy at that time, I was a bit down through no fault of my family, just myself. I wasn’t happy in where I was.”
The trial continues.